Hey, let's stop building malls. Seriously.Things are different now. We've got skateparks and pretty al fresco shopping courtyards with movie theaters for the kids who need a place to wear visors and talk on cell phones. We've got independent businesses for the socially responsible, and Super Targ-Marts for the socially responsible who need a bunch of different little things, don't have any money and only want to make one stop. Our consumer culture has evolved beyond the need for sprawling indoor bazaars. These days, they're little more than flea markets with higher prices and lower people-watching potential.
Plus, anyone who's lived in America since the late '70s is familiar with the lifecycle of any mall. The mall opens, touting a breakthrough spending experience but in reality offering exactly what every other mall does, or maybe that plus a store not often seen in malls, like, say, Pier One Imports. The mall enjoys maybe a decade, tops, of steady patronage. Then revenues drop off, and the mall slides inexorably toward a final choice: become what comedian Chris Rock called "the mall white people used to go to," become an empty edifice for sale on an offensively large parcel of wasted land, or find an eager, misguided redeveloper.
There are exceptions, of course, but the mall is subject to laws of probability equal and opposite to those on which every gambling establishment operates — the mall always loses. Interestingly, it doesn't matter where the mall is located. In unsteady areas, the mall's decline is blamed on dropping property values and fluctuating zoning distinctions; in more thriving environs, the mall is done in by a newer mall.
Even more interestingly, it seems that in most cases, a property never fully rebounds from being the site of a mall. Building one is like growing tobacco, a crop which renders the soil unfit for any other. And closing one is like salting the earth.
Until this week, I hadn't set foot in Pinellas Park's ParkSide Mall (nee Pinellas Square Mall) in four years or so. Back then, about a quarter of the storefronts were vacant. The JC Penney had already shifted over to a factory-outlet designation; I was incredibly stoked to find off-brand cargo shorts for less than 10 bucks. I bought several pair, and perused the magazine rack at that old-standby mall time-killer, WaldenBooks.
ParkSide, which sits on a neatly sloping patch of land where U.S. 19 rolls under Park Boulevard, was already getting creepy. Walking a mall and seeing maybe 250 shoppers is a bit like going to a major airport to catch a flight during the Christmas holidays, and finding only a handful of travelers, all waiting for the same lone plane. It's unsettling in a fundamental way. You get the feeling that a vital belt is slipping.
A few days ago, as Peaches and I were waiting for new tires to be put on the truck, she suggested that we walk over to ParkSide. The mall is a block and a half from the auto shop I use religiously, but I've always contented myself with breakfast at the Waffle House, shopping for greeting cards at the Walgreen's, or playing pool and demanding (and being refused) Bloody Marys well before legal serving time at the bowling alley across the street. My last ParkSide experience made me uneasy, and the mall looms atop that hill on the other side of 34th Street like some massive cinderblock Reagan-era version of Hill House (read your Shirley Jackson, people).
"I don't think it's open," I said. "They're going to tear it down."
A St. Petersburg Times article and news release from ParkSide dance studio/live-music venue Savoy South had told me as much.
But we began walking that way, and soon we discovered cars in the parking lot along with the construction machinery and piles of used office equipment. The office equipment was for sale, though they seemed to be encouraging anyone with nerve and a truck to pull up and just take it off of their hands, please.
The contemporary multi-screen movie theater, added to ParkSide's list of attractions in 2001, was still up and running. The vast majority of cars present were parked as close to it as possible. Amidst a list of movies currently being shown, the marquee stated that the Cineplex would remain open "during renovations."
Beyond the ultra-modern box office, around the corner from the game room and velvet ropes, was a scene out of Dawn of The Dead.
Peaches and I walked from the closed department store at one end to the closed department store at the other, and saw less than 50 people, and in a mall, seeing less than 50 people is like seeing no one at all. Most of them were on or around ParkSide's storied central ice-skating rink. I imagined the skaters, graceful and otherwise, as passive resistors, striving for the idyllic as things shuttered up and shut down around them.
Three-quarters of the storefronts were empty. And the ones that weren't were advertising some seriously slashed prices, mostly on hastily written posters leaning against empty glass displays. Spaced widely between obscure cool-shoe and clothing chains and familiar mall-food purveyors, the independent concerns that had been lured to the shopping center with cheap leases stood basically empty.
An art-supply shop full of pigment and dated publicity photos offered 70 percent off the already bottomed-out price tags. A hair salon catered to a couple of loyal locals. An urban-oriented music shop offered bootlegs, mix CDs, and releases by Bay area hip-hop and dancehall artists at a fraction of their worth.
The most unnerving thing, though, was the utter lack of bustle, of motion, of commerce. As Americans, we expect a busy throng; a busy throng reinforces the idea that we're in the right place.
But hell, even the WaldenBooks is gone.
A company called Boulder Venture bought ParkSide last year, and presented a plan to turn the property into a thriving open-air shopping pavilion. Maybe it'll work out; they've got the only multiple-screen theater in Pinellas Park going for them. But the long, sad history of mall-fate — which, were it expressed as a mathematical certainty, still probably wouldn't dissuade ambitious financial types from investing in them — suggests otherwise. It suggests that, eventually, that corner of U.S. 19 and Park Boulevard will go to waste as inexplicably hard to sell.
They should probably build a skatepark there, while they still can.
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4800, ext. 4856, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2004.